Free socks, a shrug and a cheap car

You know when you're handed your baby shortly after you've given birth, you marvel at this little person (my almost 16 year old was 10 pounds at birth, so I marveled at what a large baby this was!). You try to imagine as they grow what they'll be like when they're teenagers, what will they be like when they're adults. You look at their litte Jack-o-lantern smile as they climb on the bus heading to second grade and wonder. But what no one tells you is that it feels like you put them on the bus for first grade in the morning and in the afternoon when they climb off the bus you have this 6'1" boy with a deep voice and whiskers (but when you look into his eyes you still see your baby).

My middle boy is turning 16 in a couple of weeks. For his birthday he gets to get his learners permit. He will not get his drivers license until he is 17, mostly because we were lazy about getting his permit and we'd like for him to drive for a year supervised before he gets his license and he's only a sophmore in high school and his school will not allow sophmores to drive to school. That said, we did find a nice opportunity to buy a used car for him to drive and to learn in. For $1,000 the car he will have to drive is a higher end car than either my husband or I have ever owned. A 1993 Volvo. It's an automatic, I hate automatics, but even more I hate the thought of teaching my uncoordinated boy to drive a manual transmission. It has every bell and whistle known to man and gets better gas mileage than my mom-mobile. I will be driving the volvo instead of the mom-moble for a while. I've contemplated selling the Trooper, but I do like having the 4 wheel drive in the winter.

Oh, knitting, I must not forget the knitting part of this post. Free socks. Yes, you heard me, free. Well, not really free but kind of. I had ends of sock yarn and had considered just donating the ends to the school and then I thought "hmmmm, I'll bet I could get at least a pair of footies out of these ends".....and so I did. And the mother in law mentioned that she would like a shrug to keep her shoulders warm. My inlaws keep their house refrigerator cold, I'm surprised that she didn't ask for a parka, but really a shrug is easier to knit. She's 82 so I'm knitting along on that and hoping that I'll soon have it finished and can move on to something other than hospital hats and the shrug....I'm trying to resist starting another project, but Lorna keeps calling to me, taunting me. I need more hours in my day and more days in my week.